Re: EVE-Online

Originally Posted by Lucio

TBH you won't need a month to tell if you like the game. Either you can put up with the repetitive boredom accompanied by frustration as you get picked on by whichever idiot happens to dislike you or you don't.

I played for three years, mostly because when the game first started, there was a balance between the PvP and PvE aspects of the game and there was a challenge to be had in rasising the first billion ISK to buy a battleship BPO. Over the years PvP because the sole reason to play Eve, and thus I stopped playing. A game is no fun if a random idiot can come along and kill you whenever they want.

PvP in all it's forms has always been the main focus of Eve. Note that that's not just combat, some of the most brutal PvP in Eve goes on between the Yulai... err, Jita Traders. Incidentally, the current form of the game far more favours non-combatants that it used to.

As far as anybody coming along and killing you goes, in a way that's what makes the game so fun for me. Though in truth it's laughably easy to avoid, with the exception of gate camps and bubble camps. That is, if you put in the effort, rather than expecting the game to do it for you.

I'll leave you with a quote from the devs that perfectly explains Eve:

"Eve isn't designed to look like a cold, harsh, brutal world. It's designed to be a cold, harsh brutal world"

Re: EVE-Online

Stay in high security areas is probably the best one (0.5 and up), get some friends in high places, don't go afk, or, one I recently learned the hard way, if you are jet can mining and someone comes along to steal your ore, don't try and steal it back as he might have backup and end up killing you.

Jet can theft is a pain in the arse, because it can happen in all areas.

Re: EVE-Online

Has the 21day steam trial appeared yet? It was announced back in January but all I ever get on steam is 'coming soon'.

PS tips on how to laughably easily avoid people coming and killing you would be welcome.

Bit of a late reply but here goes.

The first thing is to join a good corp. The biggest factor in eve is having friends around to help you. The absolute best recomendation I can give is Eve University. They specialise in helping newbies get used to the game and they will take you from day one. Quite simply I can't reccomend these guys enough, they'll teach you the ins and outs of Eve as well as help you get into a more permanent corp once you get yourself going (alternatively, you can stay on as an instructor).

Additionally, I'd reccomend grabbing some cheap frigs and going and trying out PvP (though if you are in Eve Uni you'll obviously have to abide by their rules). The single most damaging myth in Eve is that you have to have 30 mill SP to be good at PvP. In fact, leaving it this long will damage you asd you'll have some pretty limiting pre-conceptions. With the initial skill boost, if you start with a combat background you'll have all the skills required to make a start in PvP. This is how I started out, flying ships that cost ~500,000 ISK total, or to put it another way, less than a minute to replace. Note that using these I was able to take down ships worth over 100 million ISK.

Onto some more pointer orientated advice though. The first thing to bear in mind is that no matter what it may look like there is nowhere, and I'll emphasise here nowhere, that you are truly safe from other players. Even in Hi-sec you have war-decs to deal with qwhen in player corps, along with suicide ganks. The war-dec is less of an issue, since if you are in a decent corp (see above) they will rally round to fend off the attackers. The more problematic issue is suicde ganks. Basically this involves high alpha strike ships killing you before concord has a chance to intervene. Given that this inevetably involves the attacker losing their ships the best way to avoid this is to make it economically unviable for the attacker, so, whilst carrying expensive cargo never, ever, ever, afk travel. Additionally, fit a tank to your ship rather than fitting for max cargo capacity, a buffer (high hp/resist) works better here as armour repairers/shield boosters simply won't have the time to kick in.

The final problem in high sec is can theft/flipping, which is only really a problem for jetcan miners (ironically this came about due to an ore theft nerf whined for by hi-sec carebears, of course every pirate saw this problem coming a mile off, and warned of it). Basically this involcves ethier soming stealing from your can (giving you kill rights) then turning out to have a Pv~P fit when you try to take revenge, or the more insidious can flip, whereby someone steals from your can and then drops the item back in, thereby setting the can to their ownership. Then, when you go to haul your ore back to station, you've effectively stole from them and they gank you.

A further problem (though spread everywhere) ii the lofty scam, which involves a glitch in the gang mechanics in order to kill you. It's easy to avoid though, simply don't gang anyone you don't know.

For lo-sec combat avoidance there's a few things. First, stay aligned to warp, the simplest way to do this is to warp to a point, then just before you enter warp cancel it. This will leave you pointed directly at you destination. Once you get bettter you can do it on manual though. For these purposes stargates and belts are out (too much risk of running into camp) along with moons (too much risk of running into a "death-star" Player Owned Station). Planets are good, along with using warp to zero to a station and then instantly docking. Note that with the latter you must not shoot back, as that will give you an aggro timer, leaving you unable to dock.

The best bet however is a mid system safespot. The way to make these is to warp from planet a to planet b (any will do, just remember not to use moons), creating a bookmark mid-warp. Then do the same with planets x and y. Finally, warp from a-b to x-y and create a bookmark in between and you have your safespot. In a system you use often you should have a few of these so you can warp in between to avoid being scanned.

Re: EVE-Online

Whilst you're doing missions in lo-sec always have your ship scanner open. Set the directional scanner to 360 degress and scan out to a distance of ~500,000km. Then making sure you have "use overview settings" unticked sort by type and hit the scan button whenever you can. The moment you see "scan probes" on the overview warp-out, as you're being probed out and combat is on it's way.

That's all I can think of for now, though I'll post again if I remember anything later.

Apologies for the wall of text btw

Edit: just remembered something on the auto-pilot. Basically the AP will drop you at 15 Km from the gate, leaving you to trek to it under conventional thrust, you can however manually warp to zero. The way around this is to first set your overview settings to display stargates. The yellow stargate on your overview is your next AP destinatrion. Right click on this and warp to zero, then, mid warp switch your AP on, and as soon as your ships computer says whatever it says about jumping switch your AP back off, leaving you on the other side of the gate, cloaked, ready to repeat the process over. This will make you invunerable on the inbound gate and only vulnerable on the outbound, where, under cloak (30 seconds) you can have a look and decide whether to carry on or high-tail it back to the gate and retreat.

Edit 2: If you're trying out PvP just to get an idea of how it works, don't podkill. PKing is by far the biggest hit to your sec status and will get you an outlaw tag pretty quickly.

Re: EVE-Online

Yeah noticed that.. now the question is when does the 21days start? Can we pre-load the trial before actually starting, or is it going off our steam accounts thus 21 days from start of downloading (which will take nearly a week at steam speeds)?

Re: EVE-Online

Originally Posted by kalniel

Yeah noticed that.. now the question is when does the 21days start? Can we pre-load the trial before actually starting, or is it going off our steam accounts thus 21 days from start of downloading (which will take nearly a week at steam speeds)?

I did it the same day I posted about it, you download the demo client first and then sign up when you want to start playing, that's when the 21 days starts.